These City Streets! (pt.2)

“The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.” Desmond Morris.

Good morning beautiful fam! HAPPY HOLIDAYS! 🙂 I have seriously missed been in this space. It’s been a bit of a long year for me and I believe most of us, so today I’m trying something different and hopefully more entertaining. Let me know if you want more posts like these, I’m also hoping it will be good enough for you guys to forgive me for vamoosing. Why part 2 you ask? I did one last year (here). Enjoy!

Your alarm rudely wakes you and you stretch your arm to where it is, look at the time and make a wish you can sleep even for five more minutes. You notice you have to get up but lie to yourself, five minutes won’t hurt I will save it by skipping or rushing a morning step in your routine. Unfortunately, like almost all the time you oversleep and wake up in a mini-panic mode. Get out of bed quickly perhaps stub your toe a few times, knock over things and just get enraged and feel like the universe has conspired against you. At this point, you may or may not have breakfast or pull a Hollywood ‘bye guys’ *grabs an apple and you’re off. It is at this moment the dread of manoeuvring through the CBD gives you more to simmer about. You woke up at the darkest point in the night only to be in jam for over an hour. You reach the CBD and the circus-like clockwork unfolds. You zip and dash through the streets in a hurried manner dodging people’s shoulders and weaving through all the human traffic. Did I forget to mention our lovely street-preneurs? Hawkers nowadays are everywhere in the city, forget that it’s bloody early in the morning, some have already set up shop. Now, it is at this point walking on the streets of Nairobi becomes an ‘imbo’ (fake) version of temple run; your goal is to reach work without getting caught in a scuffle with the hawkers for accidentally stepping on their merchandise. Oh! But we are not done, matatu drivers in the city are the most eccentric and boda-bodas (motorbike) who are just so damn annoying to both drivers and pedestrians. Fu@k what you were taught in school; ‘look left, look right, look left again and cross’ tafadhali (please), in Nairobi you may be hit, the motorbikes are lunatics riding in as many directions as a compass, it’s a one way but nope rules don’t apply and they come dashing in the opposite direction and even use sidewalks as a road, exasperating to say the least.

So, a quick recap of your morning before you reached work in the city; woke up at witching hours, stubbed your toe a couple of times, no breakfast because of traffic, hawkers making you play dodging games and crossing roads with crazy motorists. This is a typical morning unless that morning KPLC decided to extend your night by having no electricity and your day just gets more crappy, or it rained and you go all Super Mario jumping and hopping all over avoiding water and mud puddles. This is why I prefer a flexible job in the city where you have the option of working from home.

One thing is for sure, to survive in my city you need to have grit, to thrive you need street smarts and to enjoy what it offers you need to be adventurous. Like any other city in the world, it is not perfect, though the County Government is seriously sleeping on their job. No hurry in Africa eh? Visit Nairobi first then get back to me 😉 .

Keep Smiling 🙂

Simply Siro

MICH 27